Money and power: the great predators in the political economy of development, by Sarah Bracking, London, Pluto Press, 2009, vii–xiv + 242 pp., £24.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780745320113
It has been a long time since a book like this has been written. Sarah Bracking's Money and power can be seen as continuing the tradition of critical analyses of foreign ‘aid’ started decades ago with Teresa Hayter's Aid as imperialism (1971) and Cheryl Payer's The World Bank: a critical analysis (1982), continuing with Susan George's A fate worse than debt (1988) and Catherine Caufield's Masters of illusion: the World Bank and the poverty of nations (1996), not to mention those from the right such as Lord Peter Bauer (1971) – who many of my students confuse with Paul Baran. Money and power is a welcome and youthful addition to this aging repertoire of critical political economy, more so because it adds real rigour to the crusading artefacts from the past – something much needed these days, when our expectations of radical change are less, and for solid empiricism, more. If there is anything to the hopes that more of the latter will lead to more of the former, books such as Bracking's are very, very necessary.
Perhaps the prime merit of Money and power rests in its critical focus on aid for the private sector. The book opens with a stab at crucial definitional issues and the big debate about whether or not global capitalism can advance the forces of production in its peripheral parts: the line is ‘probably not’. The close analysis of aiding the private sector begins with a study of Britain's Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), which traces its changing emphasis from a statist to a more nakedly profit-making approach to development. Then, however, the book's purview widens to examine a range of other predators. This includes various bilateral ‘development’ institutions which actually distort the discourse of free markets to support their own: the various export credit agencies around the world specialising in ‘private’ assistance, as well as the legions of consultants assessing the prospects and results of such ‘assistance’. The analysis of such predatory ‘development’ assistance includes the mirage of ‘debt relief’, and does not forget the potential impact of aid rivals from the new capitalist powers of the world such as China. Bracking blends masterful statistical analysis to challenge any economist, with deconstruction of discourse taking on any postmodernist.
Money and power is an excellent example of research going from the local (the British efforts to subsidise private development – which has commendable historical reach) to the global (other OECD private-sector developers) and back to the local (sites in Africa where these investments have taken place). At the end of it all readers are presented with an incisive survey of the inconclusive mainstream ‘what is wrong with aid’ discussions ranging from Burnside and Dollar (2004) to Easterly (2006) and Collier (2007). This leads up to a Habermasian and Foucauldian analysis which proposes a solution that would turn the Great Predators into Great Providers for ‘small, worker- and community-run projects in the public, community and mutual sector … [and] the mass of small traders and entrepreneurs’ in whom Raul Prebisch had so much faith (p. 212). Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, given what Bracking teaches us, there are no examples of this although we are warned about the perils of the ever more fashionable and ubiquitous microcredit panacea.
Money and power combines clear theoretical starting points, straightforward ideological principles, and careful, incontrovertible calibrations of the money flows that mean power. In doing so, the book sets a new standard in the literature, deserving a place on senior undergraduate or postgraduate course curricula on the aid industry, not to mention on the desks of its captains and spin doctors.